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Amnesty Hypercube now does Facebook too

Amnesty Hypercube, which is probably the best name I've seen this year, has a new Facebook app that's pretty handy if you're a user of their desktop application. Like its other "Amnesty" services, the new app from the folks at Mesa Dynamics takes pretty much any widget code you can throw at it, and runs it in Facebook. In turn, it syncs up with Amnesty's desktop widget app, meaning any widgets you add at home will be available without having to re-add them.

There are several reasons why this is useful. One is for … Read more

Free playlist: new releases

Across the board, it's been a great week in music. With the fall releases pouring out, we just added new songs from James Blunt, Dashboard Confessional, T.I., Interpol, and more. One notable release is our full album stream of Herbie Hancock's latest "River: The Joni Letters," which is a tribute to Joni Mitchell (who conveniently enough just released an album as well). Check out the song "Court and Spark" featuring Norah Jones. Since there's some much to swallow this week, we made it simple for you by compiling this free playlist. Now … Read more

Flickr walks the plank (plus other pirate goodies)

In case you hadn't noticed, today is "International Talk Like a Pirate Day," which means it's socially acceptable to start speaking in tongues to your friends, family, and coworkers without them being able to roll their eyes as much as they usually do. It's also a time to check out Flickr, who has managed to translate the entirety of the site to pirate-speak. To toggle this option, just go down to the bottom of the page and select "Arrr!" as the language. Flickr's logo changes, along with all the menus, greeting messages, … Read more

Run multiwidget desktops with Amnesty Hypercube

Amnesty Hypercube is a small application for Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X that will help you pull bits of Web content to use as widgets. These widgets can be brought up or dismissed ad hoc, or added to your desktop as a permanent fixture. Besides its cool name (second only to flux capacitor), the service is not so different from many existing widget platforms, like Yahoo Widgets, OS X's Dashboard, or the Windows Vista sidebar. Yet the company is taking a slightly different approach, one a little closer to Yourminis, which uses Adobe Integrated Runtime to run widgets on your desktop.… Read more

Get Leopard's Web Clip feature now

At Apple's WWDC a few weeks ago, the crowd was oohing and aahing when Steve Jobs showed off one of Leopard's new features called Web Clip. Web Clip is a feature built into the Leopard version of Apple's Safari browser that lets you take a section of any Web site and turn it into a widget for OS X's Dashboard. WWDC 2007 wasn't the first time Apple had shown off Web Clip. In fact, the feature had been demonstrated at last year's WWDC conference in August, although not during the high-profile keynote.

For Mac … Read more

News roundup: StumbleUpon, Last.fm, Xbox 360 chat

StumbleUpon/eBay talks heat up. The Wall Street Journal is reporting (registration required) that a deal between eBay and StumbleUpon to acquire the social networking and content recommendation service is getting closer. No agreement has been made on price, but the rumored amount brings it somewhere near $75 million dollars. If acquired, StumbleUpon's content preference algorithms could be employed on eBay's auction listings to give eBay users a new way to get recommendations on things they might want to buy. ( CNET News.com Blog)

Last.fm launching video service. As reported by the Register in March, Last.fmRead more

Microsoft rolls out the spring '07 dashboard update for Xbox 360

The next time you turn on your Xbox 360 and connect to Xbox Live, you'll be asked to download the latest dashboard update from Microsoft. Like previous updates in the past, this spring '07 update is filled with dozens of tweaks and additions to make life a little easier and more enjoyable when navigating through the 360's operating system.

This time around, Microsoft has focused the update on communication, as support for Windows Live Messenger has been added to the system. Additionally, Microsoft has announced that sometime in the summer it will release a keyboard attachment for all … Read more

Google Analytics gets a face-lift

Google Analytics relaunched today, adding several new visualization tools and ways to share data with others. The tool gives Web site owners a free and relatively easy system to keep track of how people are accessing content on their site, including ways to track which content is getting the most views, how much time each user is spending on the site, and the number of visits by time of day. There's also a handy map overlay which will show you where your users are, right down to the city they live in.

One of the updated features is the Analytics dashboard, which is now completely customizable and has simplified data. Users can relocate, add, and remove the various data widgets, in a similar fashion to that of iGoogle. Also new is the option to e-mail or export reports as PDFs, which can now be scheduled to be sent out automatically every day, week, month or quarter using a built-in calendar. Previously you were only able to export it as a non-human-friendly XML file.

The service is mainly an extension of Google's AdWords program, which lets site owners purchase words that link to various parts of their site via contextual ads that show up on Google or partnered search engine results. But even if you're not interested in making money it's a free Analytics solution that requires no software, just a line of code on any page you want to keep track of. If you're a WordPress user, there's even a plug-in to automatically add it to your site. Blogger users are also able to add it by tweaking their blog template.

There's more information about the update on the Google Analytics Blog post. For more screenshots of the new dashboard, keep reading. … Read more

YourMinis puts widgets on the desktop via Apollo

YourMinis, the popular single page aggregator service, has launched desktop integration with its library of over 14 million widgets, using Adobe's Apollo technology. After installing the Apollo runtime and the YourMinis Apollo plug-in on your PC or Mac, you can simply click on any widget in the YourMinis library and click "Add to Desktop." Likewise, there's the option to send any widget to the Web if you'd prefer it to stay on one of your YourMinis pages. It's really well-done.

Once they're on your desktop, you can drag them around, change colors, transparency … Read more

Widgipedia: Wikipedia for widgets?

There are a lot of widgets out there. So many, in fact, that sorting through them can be absolutely daunting. Joining the fray of sites that attempt to solve this problem is Widgipedia, a site that catalogs and hosts widgets, both Web-based and downloads. We've covered competitor Widgetbox several times, and the two sites are quite similar. Where Widgipedia differs is in mixing up widgets that run on different platforms: those that run right in your browser and ones you download for various engines such as Mac OS X's Dashboard and Yahoo Widgets. The result is a diverse … Read more